Monday, February 28, 2005

Steve standing next to the Howard Hughes's "Hercules" flying boat while attending an Oscar party being held there.photo by Christina F. York

Tonight I took an evening off from the third Conan book to go with Chris to a special benifit Oscar party being held in honor of "The Aviator." It was held at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, about 50 miles from our home.

The Hercules flying boat is indeed a wonder. The mind simply has trouble grasping just how huge it is unless some point of reference is offered. When we first saw the plane, it was in the finally stages of assembly, and a workman was up on the horizontal tail, a surface that I'd guess is about the size of a tennis court. Every time he would walk to the edge of the tail so you could see him, the plane would seem to magically double in size. But when he walked out of sight, it seemed to shrink down again. The entire plane is a gigantic optical illusion.

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About J. Steven York

Steve is a nationally best-selling author of short-fiction and many novels . He's dabbled in such fictional universes as Robert E. Howard's Conan, Star Trek, MechWarrior, Transformers, and Marvel's X-Men, and has also written for computer games, but these days he's focusing more on his original fiction and related projects.

He's the creator of a weekly web-comic, Minions at Work. He has orignal short stories appearing in several upcoming mass-market anthologies.

He's married to fellow novelist (and sometime collaborator) Christina F. York. They live overlooking the Pacific on the Oregon coast. They maintain a shared website that serves as the hub of their multi-media empire, www.yorkwriters.com.